Oh thank you for your very detailed explanation. I was bothering people on #rubyonrails and #git but got no answers. I'm on Ubuntu 8.10. The files I'm working on live on an NTFS drive (my "storage" drive; yes, I still have to boot into Windows). If it being on NTFS makes a difference I'll try this on ext3 and let you know what happens :) Thanks, Ramon Tayag On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 2:07 AM, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > On Fri, 12 Dec 2008, Ramon Tayag wrote: >> >> I've come across a problem that I don't believe lies in Rails. You >> needn't be familiar, I think, with Rails to see what's wrong. >> >> I can't seem to add the files that are in >> http://dev.rubyonrails.org/archive/rails_edge.zip >> >> 1) Unpack the zip >> 2) Initialize a git repo inside the folder that was unpacked >> 3) git add . >> >> See the errors.. :o http://pastie.org/337571 > > What platform/filesystem is this? > > Git is rather particular about symlinks, and it looks like your platform > does something odd, and that makes git unhappy about your symlink. > > In particular: > > ls -l vendor/rails/actionpack/test/fixtures/layout_tests/layouts/ > ... > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 48 2008-12-12 18:22 symlinked -> ../../symlink_parent > > notice how the symlink content is "../../symlink_parent", but then take a > look at the _size_ of the symlink: 48 bytes. > > Git expects the lstat() information to match the return from readlink(), > and it doesn't. > > For exact details, see "index_path()" in sha1_file.c: > > case S_IFLNK: > len = xsize_t(st->st_size); > target = xmalloc(len + 1); > if (readlink(path, target, len + 1) != st->st_size) { > char *errstr = strerror(errno); > > ie we consider it an error if we get less than st_size characters back > from readlink(). > > Now, admittedly git is probably being really annoyingly anal about this > all, and we probably should loosen the restrictions on it a bit, but I'd > like to know why it happens. I cannot recall this having been reported > before, so it's some specific filesystem or OS that causes this, I think. > > Linus > -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html